For 50 years, the semiconductor manufacturing industry has followed the arc of Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit chip doubles about every two years. The progression of Moore's Law imposes requirements on manufacturers to develop processes and equipment suited to constructing devices with ever-decreasing dimensions. Such demanding requirements imply tolerance of imperfection and impurity that rapidly approaches zero.
Semiconductor devices are generally constructed by implanting dopants into a semiconductor substrate, such as a silicon substrate. A layer of oxide is applied over the doped substrate to serve as a gate. As such devices grow smaller, implantation depth declines, and the effect of any impurity or imperfection in construction of the device is magnified. The processes used for implanting dopants, annealing or thermally treating substrates, cleaning substrates, and applying gate oxide layers must continually improve to drive such impurities and imperfections to lower levels. Thus, there is a continuing need for improved processes for constructing such semiconductor devices.